Traditionally, in cloud computing environments a cloud computing provider (“provider”) sells a service to consumers and controls the hardware and software that supports the service. Often, in cloud computing environments, the consumer lacks control of the underlying service infrastructure and the infrastructure specifics, such as geographical location of hardware and data, are hidden from the consumer. Consumers in some industries may operate under business constraints. These business constraints, among other things, may dictate where data is stored, where processing may occur, and who has access to the data. Because the business constraints may impose liabilities for violating them, the lack of consumer transparency and control of the cloud computing infrastructure may keep those consumers from utilizing cloud computing services.
To address consumer concerns about the cloud computing infrastructure, some providers may offer service level agreements, which may, for example, specify a tolerable percentage of service downtime. However, there is no general mechanism by which these agreements address the consumer's business constraint liabilities arising from provider failures.